Page 54 - Neutrons for Sciences and Society

Neutrons for Science
2.3 Louis Néel (1904-2000)
The role of Louis Néel in the creation of the ILL was quite different from Maier-Leibnitz and Horowitz, but was vital. Without him I do not know if the ILL would exist, but it certainly would never have been created at Grenoble, and would have been very different from what it is.
Louis Néel was born in 1904
in Lyon. At the age of seven he
suffered from polio, which left him
with a limp throughout his life. In
1924 he entered the Ecole Normale
Supérieure in Paris, and in 1928
became assistant to Pierre Weiss
in Strasbourg. The latter was the foremost French specialist in magnetism. Néel submitted his thesis in 1937, and was appointed professor when Weiss retired.
It was at this time he imagined the existence of compounds called antiferromagnets, composed of two equivalent lattices but magnetised in opposite directions. Most theoreticians, with the exception of Van Vleck, couldn’t believe in the existence of such compounds. Néel mistrusted the theoreticians, and had great respect for Van Vleck. There was no experimental proof
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Fig. 2.4: Louis NÉEL at a reception in Grenoble in honour of his Nobel prize (1970)